THE PATRIOT POST - ALEXANDER'S COLUMN 08/27/2014

ObamaCore: 'Why Johnny [Still] Can't Read'

The Systemic Dumbing-Down of America

By Mark Alexander · August 27, 2014   

"If a nation expects to be ignorant -- and free -- in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson (1816)

In William Shakespeare's "Tempest," Act V, Miranda observes, "O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't."
It is those words from which Aldous Huxley drew the title of his 1932 novel, "Brave New World."
In that celebrated work, Huxley describes a utopian future in which a central authority maintains totalitarian rule and obedience by re-education -- replacing historical comprehension with a common core of indoctrination, utilizing sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning.
Huxley's utopian apparition compares with that of George Orwell's 1949 dystopian narrative, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," and that of Ayn Rand in her 1957 work, "Atlas Shrugged," but all three were, and remain, significant expositions of the loss of Liberty and its inevitable terminus in tyranny.